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A nonlocal maximum likelihood estimation method for enhancing magnetic resonance phase maps

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Abstract

A phase map can be obtained from the real and imaginary components of a complex valued magnetic resonance (MR) image. Many applications, such as MR phase velocity mapping and susceptibility mapping, make use of the information contained in the MR phase maps. Unfortunately, noise in the complex MR signal affects the measurement of parameters related to phase (e.g, the phase velocity). In this paper, we propose a nonlocal maximum likelihood (NLML) estimation method for enhancing phase maps. The proposed method estimates the true underlying phase map from a noisy MR phase map. Experiments on both simulated and real data sets indicate that the proposed NLML method has a better performance in terms of qualitative and quantitative evaluations when compared to state-of-the-art methods.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO, Belgium) through project funding G037813N and the TOP BOF project University of Antwerp (TOP BOF project 26824).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology - Tiruchirappalli, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India

    P. V. Sudeep & P. Palanisamy

  2. Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, India

    P. V. Sudeep

  3. Department of Imaging Sciences and Intervention Radiology, Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology, Trivandrum, Kerala, India

    Chandrasekharan Kesavadas

  4. iMinds Vision Lab, Department of Physics, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

    Jan Sijbers & Arnold J. den Dekker

  5. Delft Center for Systems and Control, Delft University of Technology, 2628 CD, Delft, The Netherlands

    Arnold J. den Dekker

  6. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, India

    Jeny Rajan

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  1. P. V. Sudeep
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  2. P. Palanisamy
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  3. Chandrasekharan Kesavadas
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  4. Jan Sijbers
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  5. Arnold J. den Dekker
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  6. Jeny Rajan
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Correspondence to P. V. Sudeep.

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Sudeep, P.V., Palanisamy, P., Kesavadas, C. et al. A nonlocal maximum likelihood estimation method for enhancing magnetic resonance phase maps. SIViP 11, 913–920 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-016-1039-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-016-1039-6

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